Pedro Aires Oliveira

Twitter mining for traffic events detection

Nowadays with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets on the market, almost everyone has access to mobile devices that offer better processing capabilities and access to new information and services. The Web is undoubtedly the best tool for sharing content, especially through social networks. One of the most useful information that can be extracted is the geographical one. Current navigation systems lack in several ways to satisfy the need to process and reason upon such volumes of data, namely, to accurately provide information about urban traffic in real-time and the possibility to personalize the information used by such systems. This paper describes an approach to integrate and fuse tweet messages from traffic agencies in UK, with the objective of detecting the geographical focus of traffic events. Tweet messages are considered in this work given its uniqueness, the real time nature of tweets which may be used to quickly detect a traffic event and its simplicity; it only cost 140 characters to generate a message (called “tweet”) for any user. The approach presented here is composed by several steps: tweet classification, event type classification, name entity recognition, geolocation and event tracking. Finally, we do an experimental study on a real dataset composed by traffic related tweet messages to access the accuracy of proposed approach. We present some inaccuracies ranging from lack of geographical information, imprecise and ambiguous toponyms, overlaps and repetitions as well as visualization to our data set in UK. We finally give an outlook into potential corrections. The work presented here is still part of on-going work. Results achieved so far do not address the final conclusions but form the basis for the formalization of a domain knowledge along with the services.

‘Grocer meets Butcher’: Marcello Caetano's London visit of 1973 and the last days of Portugal's Estado Novo

The visit of the Portuguese premier Marcelo Caetano to London in July 1973 failed to boost Portugals international respectability. Instead, despite the qualified sympathy of the British Conservative government, the visit highlighted Lisbons isolation from the realities of the cold war and détente. Public protests punctuated the visit, and the gulf between the attitudes of the main British political parties to Portugal and its African policies was exposed. Labours subsequent return to power in 1974 coincided with the overthrow of the Caetano regime and the new London government helped mediate the outwardly alarming ‘revolutionary process’ in Portugal to a nervous western alliance.

Cutting Heads or Winning Hearts: Late Colonial Portuguese Counterinsurgency and the Wiriyamu Massacre of 1972

In the early 1970s, Portugal still held on to the oldest European colonial empire, resisting the winds of decolonization in Africa. In this period, the Portuguese were fighting counterinsurgency campaigns in three of its overseas territories: Angola, since 1961; Guinea, since 1963; and Mozambique, since 1964. This article focuses on the counterinsurgency campaign in Mozambique because it was there, in 1972, that the most serious known atrocity took place, at least in terms of its international impact, from these unconventional wars. The appointment of a new commander-in-chief, Kaúlza de Arriaga (1970–73), to Mozambique intensified the war. Larger airborne search and destroy operations were carried out in an attempt to win the campaign quickly and decisively. It was in this context that the killing of civilians took place somewhere around the town of Tete in December 1972, which was eventually followed by an international outcry in response to its public denunciation by Catholic missionaries. The exact location, even the existence of Wiriyamu, as well as the extent of the atrocities, remain contentious. This article will use multiple sources to clarify as far as possible: what happened, why it happened, and its implications for the dynamics of counterinsurgency and intra-state wars generically. Furthermore, it will address specifically what it meant for the Portuguese way in counterinsurgency, until the rapid end of multiple campaigns as a result of a military coup in April 1974, in which Mozambique and the stain of Wiriyamu loomed large.

SmartLife – Exergames and Smart Textiles to Promote Energy-Related Behaviours Among Adolescents

SmartLife aims to promote healthy living habits and avoid sedentary lifestyles in adolescents by creating a mobile game that requires lower body movement, and uses tailored feedback, based on physical activity indices measured by a smart shirt. To date, no serious games exist that tailor game play by real-time feedback on achievement of the target behaviour. This approach can improve current exergames by reaching higher levels of intensity in physical activity, which is needed to impact on health. The tailored approach also supports competence and feasibility and hence reduces drop-out and injury risks.

The Cultural Turn and Beyond in International History

This is the introduction to the theme issue I guest edited; see associated records for the theme issue as a whole and my substantive contribution to it.

The Power and Limits of Cultural Myths in Portugal's Search for a Post-Imperial Role

ABSTRACT The central role in Portuguese political culture of the identification of Portugal as a colonizing power legitimized a massive mobilization and violent response to the perceived existential threat of decolonization in the shape of prolonged wars in its main African colonies (1961–1974). If, however, this cultural myth of a Greater Portugal overseas was so powerful, how was decolonization eventually possible? The accumulated human and economic cost of facing three simultaneous, protracted anti-colonial insurgencies eroded this overseas creed and made Catholic and Marxist strands of anti-colonialism increasingly attractive to younger, more internationally connected, Portuguese elites. What also happened, however, this article will argue, was a refashioning of the powerful cultural myth of a special connection between Portugal and tropical Africa. A colonial myth was turned into a post-colonial myth legitimizing decolonization as a mutual and fraternal liberation from the same oppressive regime without a loss of strong ‘natural’ cultural bonds. More widely, the article aims to show that we cannot ignore the importance of cultural factors in international history. Our approach in this article is pluralist and this means that while arguing strongly for taking culture seriously and focusing on it, it does consider other, including more material, dimensions of power.

Saved by the Civil War: African ‘Loyalists’ in the Portuguese Armed Forces and Angola's Transition to Independence

ABSTRACT The article examines the trajectories of ‘loyal’ African troops in Angola before and after the demise of Portugals authoritarian regime in 1974. It starts by placing the ‘Africanisation’ drive of the Portuguese counterinsurgency campaign in a historical perspective; it then explores the rocky transition from colonial rule to independence in the territory between April 1974 and November 1975, describing the course of action taken by the Portuguese authorities vis-à-vis their former collaborators in the security forces. A concluding section draws a comparison between the fate of Portugals loyalists in Angola and the one experienced by similar groups in other ex-Portuguese colonies. The choice of Angola has the advantage of allowing us to look into a complex scenario in which the competition amongst rival nationalist groups, and a number of external factors, helped to produce a more ambiguous outcome for some of the empires local collaborators than what might have been otherwise expected.

SmartLife smart clothing gamification to promote energy-related behaviours among adolescents

Inactivity and high sedentary behavior among adolescents are main societal problems. Unhealthy lifestyles place a large burden on society and promoting healthy lifestyles is thus key for health, wellness and economic prosperity. These non-communicable diseases and unhealthy lifestyles furthermore occur more often among lower socio-economic groups, which indicates a need for healthy lifestyle promotion programs to help reduce health inequalities and improve social inclusion. The SmartLife project aims to create a mobile game that requires lower body movement, and is personalized by physiological feedback measured by smart textiles. Personalization via smart textiles can present a game challenge achievable for the current fitness level of the player and can adjust this based on activity levels during game play. This approach can improve current exergames to achieve a higher level of intensity in physical activity, needed to create a health impact, and can do so considering what is achievable for the person and hence reduce drop-out and injury risks.

An Approach for Detecting Traffic Events Using Social Media

Nowadays almost everyone has access to mobile devices that offer better processing capabilities and access to new information and services, the Web is undoubtedly the best tool for sharing content, especially through social networks. Web content enhanced by mobile capabilities, enable the gathering and aggregation of information that can be useful for our everyday lives as, for example, in urban mobility where personalized real-time traffic information, can heavily influence users’ travel habits, thus contributing for a better way of living. Current navigation systems fall short in several ways in order to satisfy the need to process and reason upon such volumes of data, namely, to accurately provide information about urban traffic in real-time and the possibility to personalize the information presented to users. The work presented here describes an approach to integrate, fuse and process tweet messages from traffic agencies, with the objective of detecting the geographical span of traffic events, such as accidents or road works. Tweet messages are considered in this work given their uniqueness, their real time nature, which may be used to quickly detect a traffic event, and their simplicity. We also address some imprecisions ranging from lack of geographical information, imprecise and ambiguous toponyms, overlaps and repetitions as well as visualization to our data set in the UK, and a qualitative study on the use of the approach using tweets in other languages, such as Greek. Finally, we present an application scenario, where traffic information is processed from tweets massages, triggering personalized notifications to users through Google Cloud Messaging on Android smartphones. The work presented here is still part of on-going work. Results achieved so far do not address the final conclusions but form the basis for the formalization of a domain knowledge along with the urban mobility services.

Semantic Annotation of Aquaculture Production Data

Aquaculture is probably the fastest growing food-producing sector in the world producing nearly 50 percent of the fish that is used for food, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). With the growing of the Aquaculture sector, problems of global knowledge access, seamless data exchanges and lack of data reuse between aquaculture companies and its related stakeholders become more evident.From an IT perspective, aquaculture is characterized by high volumes of heterogeneous data, and lack of interoperability intra and inter-organizations. Each organization uses different data representations, using its native languages and legacy classification systems to manage and organize information, leading to a problem of integrating information from different sources due to lack of semantic interoperability that exists among knowledge organization tools used in different information systems.The lack of semantic interoperability that exists can be minimized, if innovative semantic techniques for representing, indexing and searching sources of non-structured information are applied. To address these issues, authors are developing a platform specifically designed for the aquaculture sector, which will allow even small companies to explore their data and extract knowledge, to improve in terms of use of feed, environmental impact, growth of the fish, cost, etc.Copyright